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Sometimes You’ve Got to Go and Fight

While we should pull out of Iraq, that doesn’t mean that the United States should develop ostrich diplomacy and stay out of most conflicts while those in other countries suffer. We had a reason for being in Iraq, just as we have a reason for being in Afghanistan, and that reason is the Taliban. We don’t want them coming here, though it also seems that most people don’t want them anywhere.

We were wrong to go into Iraq but not for the reasons that most people think. Our gravest mistake in going was that our generals and leaders didn’t know the enemy’s culture and mindset. It’s like something my mother used to say, “When you sit down at the table, know who you are sitting down with.” We didn’t bother to think about who we were sitting down with and it cost us. Seven years later, 5,000 deaths and trillions of dollars later, it cost us.

We shouldn’t use our popularity index and fear that we have overstepped our bounds as a reason for avoiding a fight. The idea of the ugly American has been around for decades and isn’t going to change whether we were in Iraq of anywhere else. Besides, the reasons behind most anti-American sentiment may not be our foreign policy, but that we are privileged on the whole and one of the richest nations on earth.

However, the next time we go to war, our leaders should also ask themselves whether they’d be willing to send their children or their children’s children to die, not some stranger’s children but their own. If they would, then this would be the true litmus test of whether we should engage in battle.